Time Out

I went to a seminar today regarding autistic disorders and the presenter talked about possible reactions to stimulus that are hard to imagine: a sound triggering a taste in the mouth, a touch triggering a color, or eye contact being physically painful.

As Louis J. Pojman writes in Who Are We, "We can imagine a world with different physical laws--where Einstein's laws do not govern, where water is not wet nor fire hot, where mice are smarter than humans, and babies are born from elephants--but we cannot imagine a world without time."

It's funny, isn't it? We can't see time, taste it, feel it, or smell it. Even our "measurement" of it is arbitrary -- what is a minute? Or a second? Yet we all orient our lives around time.